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From My Inbox: More Defense Of SEO

I spent about a half-hour today defending SEO privately in an email to
someone questioning it. Upon reflection, I thought those responses should go
into a public post. After all, the discussion involved Stephen Colbert, the
great Jason Calacanis mystery project that will kill SEO as well as those
scumbag SEOs themselves. So I’ll end my week with a Friday defense of SEO once
again (sigh).

Yes, Stephen Colbert is no longer ranking tops for "greatest living american"
in searches on Google. That’s thanks to Google updating its Googlebombing
detection algorithm. The real news here, by the way, isn’t that Colbert dropped.
It’s that Google’s supposedly automatic Google bomb detection system is anything
but. From what Google’s Matt Cuttscommented:

It’s not a manual change; it’s just a fresh push of our Googlebomb data.
The algorithm doesn’t run every day

In other words, no, Google didn’t go out and manually yank Colbert out of the
results. But then again, the algorithm clearly wasn’t smart enough to catch this
new link bomb. Instead, about three weeks after Colbert began ranking, a "fresh"
link bomb algorithm was pushed out to catch it.

Frankly, Colbert was a classic Googlebombing situation. The existing
algorithm should have grabbed it. Instead, I tend to like what Michael Graysuggested
happened:

Also commenting on the article was Brandon Wirtz,feeling
all left out and lonely from my Colbert story:

No mention of me? I was number 2 prior to the change and am now number one.
ColbertNation had no mention of the words Greatest Living American when they
took the number one spot, so many people thought Google was playing along the
other way. Is it that hard to believe that with my paltry 85 links that I
achieved more than Rand Fishkin, and Joe Griffin with their several thousand?
Colbert has something like 500k at last check. It screams Google Bomb. I was
the only person trying who actually optimized my page and strategically chose
links.

This article was carefully written to not mention who was in first. Likely
to keep me from gaining a legitimate link.

Brandon, the article wasn’t carefully written to avoid mentioning you. You
weren’t mentioned because, well, you’re not Stephen Colbert. Sorry to break
this news to you :)

It’s not hard to believe you are ranking tops. I believe you are the only
other person who has tried to overtly rank tops for that term, by asking
people to link to you that way. Rand did NOT ask for links to his sites. He
asked for links to the Colbert site. And as you, as well as my article, note
— Colbert would be in the tops if those words were on the ColbertNation.com’s
home page.

As for paltry 85 links, Yahoo reports that at 174. Google probably has this
many if not more if you log into the Google Webmaster Central system rather
than use the public reporting tool.

Still, that’s far less than the 56,000 links Yahoo reports to the
ColbertNation home page. However, it’s not just the number of links — it’s
the anchor text of those linksGoogle Now Reporting
Anchor Text Phrases explains more about this.

You and Joe (he’s got 25 links) are working some good anchor text, but it
also suggests that if some other people using the words "greatest living
american" on their pages were to gain more links, you’d start to drop.

Maybe not, of course. Being the first to really play hard to go after this
game, you’ve become uniquely relevant for the term. You might hang in there.

Now we get to the email defending of SEO. Brandon’s
friendJake Ludington (nice
in-car wifi-equipped Xbox
setup, Brandon & Jake!) emailed me, along withJason Calacanis andChris Pirillo trying to figure out the
mystery of Brandon’s spectacular success. Since several people were on that
email, I don’t think the question is particularly private (nor was it flagged
that way), so I’m pretty comfortable reprinting it here:

How do you account for a complete unknown coming in and crushing the SEO
experts who were trying to put Stephen Colbert at the top of the search for
Greatest Living American? Brandon Wirtz, the guy who now owns the term, is a
video expert, but he knows nothing about SEO.

Including Jason and Chris because I think it might make for an interesting
podcast conversation.

My response:

I think that Brandon knows well if he gets a lot of people linking to him
with that phrase — and he uses that phrase on his web page itself, he has an
excellent shot at ranking well.

That’s also SEO, at least the link bombing part. SEO is much more broad
than that, of course. But fair to say, Brandon knows some things about SEO and
certainly knows plenty about getting links pointing at him.

Jake still wasn’t satisfied and came back with:

But according to some Google searching, Brandon’s page has a lack of
meaningful links, topping out at 105, while Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz has 1180
for
his page.

That’s one example, but the other SEOs in the hunt all had considerably
more links as well.

Based on what those 105 links are, I’d guess that the offer of free
software didn’t amount to much. I guess my point is, the pros got beat at
their own game by someone who shouldn’t have had a chance; someone who by the
numbers shouldn’t be at #1 now. This sort of leaves a question about why
someone would pay for SEO services or what SEO brings to the table that can’t
be figured out by any average Joe.

Ah — back to the debate over SEO. I thought we were done with that. I wanted
to be done with that, at least for this year. But as you’ll see in a bit, Jason
Calacanis in particular is going to keep beating that dead horse over the coming
weeks. But first, my response to Jake:

I don’t know that any pro tried to rank for that term. They all got behind
Colbert trying to rank for the term, and he did — until Google adjusted the
Google bomb algo to knock him out. He doesn’t use those words on his page. If
he did, he’d be back up there.

I commented more about this on my original post, after Brandon came along
trying to figure out why the article wasn’t all about him. Yep — he has
relatively few links, and Joe Griffin who ranks in the top results has even
fewer. But it’s not just the number of links — it’s the anchor text, the
words int the links themselves that count most.

It’s fairly likely that if a pro (or anyone more notable than Brandon) came
along and said they wanted to rank well for those words — and also used those
words on their page — then Brandon might drop off. Of course, he might hang
in there simply because he was the first out the gate to try and go after the
term and ride the Colbert coattails. That gives him some notoriety.

Why pay for SEO services? Because SEO is more than trying to get ranked
tops through a Google bomb. There is indeed plenty of things that an average
joe can figure out. There are plenty of times when they can use help. I have
sat on endless site clinic sessions where it becomes clear that many people
have serious site architecture issues that stop them from ranking as well as
they might. They just don’t have enough education nor the time to learn more.

At this point, I’m fairly tired of having to reexplain this every year
every time someone wants to shout SEO is dead. I’ve been having toread and
respond to it since 1997.

Here we are 10 years later — 100 years in internet terms — and search
engines and SEO is far from dead. I tend to think it’s not going to die
anytime soon. I understand the bad rep. I understand how fun it can be to call
it all snake oil and so on. I challenge anyone to sit on a site clinic panel
who wants to diss it and either put up or shut up.

Reports are this will be a search engine where the most popular queries are
answered through human powered results. And if you have humans in the mix,
then those tiresome crappy snake oil salesmen SEOs can’t mess things up.

Of course, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Microsoft, About.com, Lycos …. oh, should I
keep going? All have used humans to answer some of their top queries at
different points in the past. And they ought to do more of that.

Still, there remains a huge chunk of tail terms that you will never, ever,
ever get answered by all those humans. You’ll still have to have a crawler
that you fall back on for them. And SEO is as much about tapping into the tail
as the head. In fact, the type of SEO that people tend to ignore and not diss
or talk about is the SEO that ensures your site is search engine friendly,
crawlable, so that you naturally do well for some of those tail terms.
Surprise, surprise — a lot of sites just don’t naturally come out of the box
this way. There is indeed some real value in having an actual professional
help you.

I can build a web site. I have built web sites. They work. They might work
better or be more nicely designed if I hired a designer. Yet people tend not
to slam designers as snake oil salesmen anywhere near the way they slag off
SEOs. This is despite the fact I have been to so many crappy designed sites
that I want to gouge my eyes out — sites all in Flash when I was stuck on a
broadband connection. Sites that were impossible to bookmark. Sites that were
all pretty yet not helpful.

There’s good and bad in any industry. SEO takes more lumps than it deserves
because in particular you have a small segment that can be seen in a big way
doing link and comment spam. People want to color the entire industry that
way. And right now, it especially helps Jason’s interests to do that if he’s
launching a search engine. Rile the SEOs up, and that’s just more publicity
for the project.

No need to do that, of course, Jason. Just make Google your target. After
all, that works for Jimmy Wales. Punch at Google needing to go extinct, and
the mainstream press you’re really after will gobble you up. After all, they
don’t know SEO from Adam. But they know about big bad Google. Shift the
cannons over there.

If I’m starting to sound cranky, it’s because I am. Jason’s long been
anti-SEO (where he defines SEO as the worst elements of it), even before the
stealth project rumors came out. But as my email notes, I’m expecting he’s going
to stir the SEO pot once again to pull in some attention.

Meanwhile, I’m cranky because with all this debate going on, I’ve tried to
actually get a reasonable discussion going on. First for SES New York, I asked
both Dave Pasternack
and Jason to sit on a site clinic panel (Matt Cutts
provides an excellent rundown of a recent one). My invite explains why:

So we’ve all seen the "SEO is rocket science" debate, along with the stupid
contest. But you may have heard that what I really think would be useful is
for Dave and Jason to take part in a SEO site clinic session.

If you’ve never seen one of these, they involve people in the audience
asking for help about their sites. They aren’t getting listed or have other
issues, so they get live advice from a panel of SEOs.

I’ve done many of these, and I realized it’s probably the best way to
demonstrate to Dave and to you Jason that there are indeed a ton of people
with real honest-to-goodness SEO problems that aren’t covered in help files
and have nothing to do with blog spamming, link jamming or any of the garbage
that SEO is often dissed about.

The format would be simple. Dave and Jason would be one team; Greg Boser
and Todd Friesen would be the other. We’ll take volunteers randomly from the
audience, look at sites and offer advice on fixing things form both teams. The
deck won’t be stacked. I’ll let the audience decide through applause which
team they thought offered the most advice.

If SEO is really as easy as you think, this is an easy contest. You should
have no problem dealing with questions about site issues. In honesty, it is
much harder than either of you think, and putting you on a site clinic is the
best way for you to really understand that. If you’re brave enough, I promise
you’ll come away with a new appreciation of what it means to be an SEO
professional — and while you might not launch rockets by doing it, you’ll
also realize just how common problems versus "you just build it" or "you just
fix it once" situations.

To his credit, Jason said he was up for it. Dave never responded. And with
enough already set for the agenda, I didn’t push harder to try and make it
happen.

Instead, I thought for the upcomingSMX Advanced show
that we’d have a formal debate on whether "SEO Is Bull." You know, a real debate
with statements, responses, counter-responses and so on.

Greg Boser and Todd Friesen immediately agreed. Dave said it sounded
interesting but that he wasn’t going to attend the show. Jason agreed in general
but then pitched that there was this new thing he wanted to show first,
something that would be make SEO dead. What was it? He wouldn’t say. Just give
him about 10 minutes, then how about having the audience throw questions and
comments at him?

Well, I had Greg and Todd already set to do this other format. I wasn’t
comfortable changing stuff around unless they were happy with it. Todd, being
pretty mellow, said he’d go for it if I wanted. Greg — quite reasonably — said
he wasn’t going to do a session like that unless he was told what Jason was
planning to spring as a surprise. But Jason didn’t want to share those details
in advance. So I canned the session.

It was disappointing. There’s so much noise about SEO, and the debate was
meant to constructively advance the conversation, not just having the usual
round of link-baiting and attention-seeking. Sure, perhaps it might have been
fun to do a "yell at Jason" session. But there’s been enough yelling going on,
don’t you think? There really is an SEO profession. People actually do get paid
real money and provide real services that help people. The profession has a
reputation problem, true (though it also continues to grow and be in demand
despite this). Perhaps it’s time to shift toward addressing the profession and
its issues professionally, rather than with yet another round of knee-jerk
attacks on one side and contest-style link-bombing attacks from the other thatprove nothing?

By the way, Jason did later reconsider giving the debaters a preview, but by
that time, it was too late. My agenda had been all moved around and locked down.
Maybe I’ll do a debate for theSES San Jose show
or do the site clinic idea there. I’ll do anything that I think could bring more
education to the space.

Meanwhile, Jason has said he’s not
blogging for the time being and that he’ll beback on July 14, the
date he mentioned in the email discussion above for when SEO will be shown as
irrelevant. So that’s when the new search engine will be coming, I assume.

That’s fine. I’ll look forward to looking at it. But I’m going to stay as
much as possible out of the baiting game that this is some anti-SEO tool.
Jason’s great at the baiting, but this is one I think the SEO industry as a
whole should ignore. Instead, I’ll just be interested to see it from a search
perspective. Trot it out — let’s see if it is more useful than Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft and Ask.

Postscript: A tipster points out

See the questions posted at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jasoncalacanis
e.g. “Who is the fastest wikipedian?”

Jason isn’t asking these questions for a blog post. Wasn’t the Jason Calacanis playbook with Netscape to hire top Diggers? Do you think he might be trying the same strategy with Wikipedia and his new wiki/community-driven search engine? Wikipedia is the site that can outrank any SEO. What if he could somehow “harness” all that wikipower to make a search engine and drive all the SEOs out of business?

Postscript: Someone passed along a post today from Did-It’s marketing manager
Steve Baldwin, who takes a
rip at me for having removed the SEO debate panel from the SMX agenda:

Search maven Danny Sullivan, who has insisted that "SEO is Rocket Science"
on numerous occasions, recently decided to add a session to his forthcoming
SMX (Search Marketing Expo) entitled "Is SEO Bull?" to capitalize on the furor
and stocked the panel with pro-SEO partisans and, presumably, someone who
would take issue with the "SEO is Rocket Science/SEO Rockstars Deserve $500 an
hour" camp.

OK, fair enough: it’s Danny’s show, and he can run it anyway he wants. But
I noticed something interesting today when I checked SMX’s agenda: the "Is SEO
Bull" session has been deleted without any explanation. You can see this
yourself by comparing the Google Cache for the conference agenda with the live
page.

I’m very glad that Danny decided to cancel this "debate," which would have
been one-sided and largely self-serving to his SEO pals. But why didn’t we
read about this cancellation on Danny’s site, SearchEngineLand.com? Maybe
because such an announcement would have served as an admission that the debate
was lost long ago, and those who insist that SEO is Rocket Science are a
rapidly dwindling fringe group.

I didn’t recently decide to add the session. It was there from the start of
when the agenda went up back in early April. I did recently pull it down, for
the reasons I’ve explained above. But to further explain, here’s what I emailed
Steve (as well as Did-It execs Dave Pasternack and Kevin Lee):

As it happens, if you’d read Search Engine Land today (I gather you don’t
regularly read), you would have found an entire explanationhere.

I didn’t do a more specific post about why this was being pulled because
that was hard to do without it seeming to possibly embarrass both Jason and
perhaps your boss Dave.

In Jason’s case, he effectively wanted to change the entire format, so that
it was no longer a thoughtful, considered debate. You might disagree that
there’s a debate to be had at all. I don’t. But after getting people to agree
to one thing, a change in midstream wasn’t going to work.

I could have done a big post saying hey, Jason tried to potentially hijack
this session, but that just wasn’t very nice. But I went ahead with my post
today because Jason has continued on his anti-SEO quest now for some other
very specific reasons that I’ve outlined. So, it seemed fair enough to discuss
why I was unable to do something more reasonable.

The other reason I couldn’t do the debate is because Dave himself wouldn’t
step up to take part. Perhaps he had other priorities. Perhaps he saw no value
in it. But of the two people on the anti-SEO warpath, at least Jason was
willing to give it a go. If Dave had also been willing, I’d have worked harder
to save this. But as it was, you know — it was just all my buddies I suppose
that were willing to try. Sorry you don’t get to be my buddy, Kevin. I mean,
I’ve known you for years, but I guess your marketing manager is going to shove
you into some opposing camp he seems to have crafted in his mind.

Since you’re the marketing guy for Did-It, Steve — here’s a formal request
for you. Get Dave, or get Kevin, to be on a site clinic panel for SES San
Jose. Dave never agreed to do this for SES NY. My post explains why I think
this would be a useful education all around.

Let me know. I’m working on the agenda shortly. If it’s all bull, there
should be nothing to lose. If, you know, SEO might possibly be a bit hard for
the average person, you’ll find that out in short order — and it would be a
good learning lesson.

Alternatively, if you want to bite for a more formal debate, happy to try
this again in the original format I wanted for SMX at SES instead. It was
never meant to be one-sided. It was simply that only one side actually was
willing to turn up.